Xbox 360 HD-DVD Player Review

November 30th, 2006, 17:53 Posted By: wraggster

With PS3 just around the corner sporting its fancy Blu-ray movie functions, Microsoft has stepped up with the release of the Xbox 360 HD-DVD player - a diddy little add-on which sits discretely alongside Microsoft's daddy console offering full play back of the new high-definition movie format.

Upon emptying the box we had no trouble setting up our unit. After pushing aside PSW's gargantuan PlayStation 3 and hogging their fancy new telly, it was simply a job of hooking up Microsoft's console as normal, rigging the HD-DVD player with the included USB cable, and then plugging it in to the wall.

The player itself comes with a generous assortment of accessories for its attractive £129.99 price point, including all the plugs and leads you need to hook it up, an update disk to ready your dashboard for the oncoming new-media assault, a fully-sized universal media remote and a HD-DVD copy of Peter Jackson's King Kong - throw in a six-pack of Stella and this the hardware bargain of the year.

Updating your dashboard with HD-DVD support requires hooking up the drive, inserting the disc into your console and then an insanely quick install time of less than 5 seconds marks completition.

With installation behind you the disc tray menu item at the bottom of the dashboard is then split in half; the top section for standard Xbox 360 games and the bottom for HD-DVD movies.

At first we put the HD movie in the 360 and nothing happened. Then we put the disc into the HD-DVD and everything booted up as expected, looking gorgeous.

The quality of the picture is instantly visible; the HD-DVD format provides a significantly sharper, crisper display - so unsurprisingly we're really looking forward to HD-DVD porn.

Accidental Japanese language switching behind us, we skipped through the 400-odd scenes required to get the King Kong's action sequences and were again impressed by the quality visual display.

The ultra-high-res nature of the format naturally exposes King Kong's - at times - rather rubbish CGI, but above all we're convinced that this is an attractive purchase for owners of both an Xbox 360 and a HD TV (and what's the point of one without the other?)

The Xbox 360 HD-DVD player is in shops from tomorrow. Go on - even the disc tray sounds all high-definition. And you can pretend to your mates you've got a slim-lime 360.

Screens and review at CVG

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